The Great Thirst Boxed Set

by Mary C. Findley

  “Do we?” Aunt Sophie’s eyes had never looked so sad. “How much do you have in your heart, my treasure? A hundred verses? A thousand? In how many languages? Can we teach it to so many people who never knew it, or have forgotten it, or have neglected it, when it’s too late?”

  Uncle Naddy stirred and they both turned toward him. His eyes barely opened, and his words came out harsh and weak.

  “Behold, days are coming, declares the Lord God, When I will send a famine on the land, Not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, But rather for hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea And from the north even to the east; They will go to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, But they will not find it.”

  Orderlies and a nurse entered the room, and things got busy transferring her uncle to a gurney.

  “This is against medical advice,” said the nurse to Aunt Sophie. She nodded, tight-lipped. “You have to sign this form that you understand that, Mrs. – I mean – Doctor Ramin.”

  Talia’s aunt scribbled on the clipboard she held out. “Thank you,” she said in a thin, scared voice. Aunt Sophie led Talia to a Land Rover where she saw Guglielmo and Cindee, the two assistants. Aunt Sophie got into the private ambulance in front, with Uncle Naddy.

  Talia climbed into the back seat of the Rover. Guglielmo, whom she and Cindee had always called Jiggly, shook hands over the back of the front seat, and Cindee lunged over and hugged her.

  “He is going to be okay, right?” Cindee whimpered as they followed the ambulance away from the hospital, Jiggly driving.

  “Yes, Zanamu says yes. What happened?”

  “Cindee and I were diving,” Jiggly began.

  “Diving?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jiggly said. “Never mind, it was fun, and we found this undersea place like – I dunno, like those cave dwellings you told me about where the Indians lived, in the Great Canyon –”

  “Grand Canyon,” Cindee corrected.

  “Isn’t that what I said?” Jiggly asked. “Only underwater. We had a couple of certified divers with us, but Naddy wanted Cindee and me to supervise. He’s too fat and Sophie’s too skinny – they wouldn’t let either of them suit up, and you shoulda seen how purple Naddy’s face got. ‘That, Doctor Ramin,’ one of the diver guys said to Naddy, pointing at that big fat plum with a beard wrapped around it, ‘That is exactly why you cannot go down there with us’.”

  “Anyway, so we went into four or five chambers and found some broken pottery,” Cindee interrupted. “Naddy wanted us to snap and bag everything. We had like sixty pounds of stuff and the divers were pointing up, making cut your throat signals, and I think maybe, ‘We’ll rip your hoses off if you don’t come up’ signals too, but Jiggly wanted to check one more room. We swam in, and saw this thing that looked like a leather bag, but it wasn’t rotten at all. It was pruny and stuff, but it was perfect. It had this gold chain threaded through grommets, and an ornate lock. We snapped and snapped until the divers grabbed us to haul us out, ’cause the air was almost gone. Jiggly grabbed the bag and hauled it along, and I tried to help him, but man, was it heavy, especially with all the other stuff. The divers kept signaling like they wanted us to leave it, but no way, once we saw that symbol under the coral we got chipped away from the lock.”

  “What was it?” Talia demanded.

  “The base is up ahead,” Jiggly responded maddeningly. “We can show you once we recover the data.”

  “Recover the data?”

  “Yeah, we ran to help when we saw those guys stab Naddy and push Sophie down. Seemed like they were more important at that moment in time.”

  “Of course they were.”

  “Anyway, we spent a few minutes getting Naddy’s wound tied up, and Cindee switched the satellite signal over from capture to send, and when we turned around, the two divers were gone, and so were the two guys who attacked Naddy and Sophie. The cameras and the artifacts was gone too. The divers had nothing to do with the thieves, according to the police. They just didn’t want to stick around and maybe get stabbed too. The leather bag and all the collection sacks are history.”

  “No!” Talia almost screamed.

  “Yeah,” Cindee moaned.

  “So what did Zanamu mean, and what did you mean, that you have data, and that you can show me something, if the bags and the cameras are gone?”

  “The satellite phone. It sends and receives,” Jiggly said with a fiendish grin in the rear view mirror, like he was a mad scientist about to apply voltage to something.

  “It receives from our cameras,” Cindee said with a roll of her eyes. “The data’s backed up in the satellite phone, that Sophie kept safe and sound even when they roughed her up. They didn’t even think it was important enough to take.”

  “Oh!” Talia breathed. They drove into a small city of tents. The ambulance pulled up near the largest one.

  Workers had gathered around the main tent as the convoy approached. Two of them had brought a stretcher. They transferred Uncle Naddy onto it and carried him into the tent. The two hospital orderlies tossed the gurney back into the ambulance, slammed the doors, and drove away. Aunt Sophie jumped. Talia wrapped the tiny woman up in her arms.

  “Come inside, Zanamu.” Talia pulled her into the tent and set her down on a camp stool Cindee had just opened out. She joined Jiggly at a console Talia had never seen before. Cindee set the satellite phone in a cradle and they both started a frantic race of code-typing. Screens filled with lines of code and Talia’s eyes crossed before she gave up trying to follow it. Those two could run code like greyhounds and nobody could say who won these crazy races they ran.

  “How did you get the money for this new equipment?” Talia asked.

  “Your uncle won it, like he always does,” Aunt Sophie said. “Three weeks a year at Monte Carlo pays for every scrap of equipment we’ve ever had. You should know that by now.”

  “The devil’s wages for the Lord’s work,” Uncle Naddy chuckled, deep and rough.

  “Shhh,” Talia said, adjusting his blanket. “Don’t you have any warmer blankets?”

  “Jiggly says my blubber will keep me warm, precious one. I am as comfortable as I can be with a puncture two inches from my lung. Have you got the images up yet, lazy wretches whose slovenly service it is my curse to endure?”

  Jiggly muttered a few particularly potent Greek and Italian epithets.

  Talia walked over and slapped the back of his head hard enough to rock him on his camp chair. “God hasn’t smitten you yet for your foul mouth, so I’ll do it for Him!”

  “Do you hit your boyfriends when they don’t mind you, tchatchki?” sneered Jiggly. Talia knocked him to the floor.

  “Please, Talia, beat him senseless later,” Uncle Naddy begged. “We need that data. I am sick of his ugly mouth as well.”

  “I’ll kick your jaw loose if you speak again,” Talia warned Jiggly. “Get back up in the chair and help my uncle. And when you are done, get out of here.”

  He got up and slunk back to his seat, starting up his frantic typing as if nothing had happened.

  Slowly, agonizingly, images began to crawl up onto two of the screens. Uncle Naddy sat up with a grunt and a gasp. Neither Talia nor Aunt Sophie could hold him down. They all stared while Cindee and Jiggly rattled away, until a full sixty images crowded the displays. Talia walked over to them. “They are touch-screens!” She marveled.

  “That one – third from the left, second from the bottom, on Cindee’s screen,” Uncle Naddy gurgled, holding his side.

  “Oops, that’s my screen,” Jiggly said, cringing as if he thought Talia was going to strike him for speaking. “I crossed the wires, I guess, I was so excited to play with the new toys.”

  Talia walked over beside him and manipulated the cables, then stared at the images. Most showed thick, silty water and piles of gray and brown potsherds. This one Uncle Naddy had pointed out showed the gold lock on the leather bag.

  “It looks like bronze,” Talia mused. “High
copper content. “Uncle Naddy … Could this be … ?”

  “Yes, I think it’s orichalcum, my precious,” nodded uncle Naddy.

  “Well, I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t bother trying to blow the lock,” Jiggly sniggered.

  “Magnify the image more, Talia,” Uncle Naddy requested. “More.”

  Cindee said, “That’s it, Naddy. If we make it bigger, it’ll just distort. You can see what it is, though, can’t you?”

  “I can’t believe what I see,” Uncle Naddy murmured. “Praise God. Praise God.”

  Chapter Thirteen– Seal of the Testaments

  “The seal of the testaments,” Talia ran her fingers along the screen, as if it were a window and the seal was there, just out of reach on the other side. “But Amu, that means the proof, the only clues to where the testaments are, were in that bag. Now how will we know where to look? That seal was the last thing we knew to look for.”

  “I … I might be able to help you with that, sweet, gentle Talia,” Jiggly said. He stood up and faced Talia. “You have to promise not to hurt me, no matter what I say next, okay?”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  Jiggly scowled. “Those two divers – they offered me money to give them whatever we found on the dive. I said screw you and whatever else you would hope I would say but don’t want to hear, but then they showed me – they showed me my girlfriend Maria’s finger, with the ring I gave her still on it. They said I could have the rest of her in pieces if I didn’t make sure they had a chance to steal the stuff. So … so … I swear, I swear that I didn’t know anybody would stab Naddy. And I might have saved his life. You have to give me credit for that. Sophie was out cold, and Cindee would not stop screaming, and he would have died if I hadn’t jumped in and bandaged him up. It was all I could do to get Cindee to pick up the phone and call for help.”

  “All right,” Talia said after many long, slow, calming breaths. “What is it that you want me to believe you can do to help?”

  “I know where the divers were taking the bag. I followed them, when they first came to me, to try to see if I could get Maria away from them. I never saw her, but I saw those two talk to a tall guy in a blue outfit at a little cafe. I heard him say to meet him back there when they had whatever we found.”

  “And how many hours’ lead do they have on us?” Talia snapped. “Your help is no help at all.”

  “Yes it is. Yes it is. That guy is the cafe owner. He’ll still be there, and you can kick him ’til he cooperates, and maybe get my Maria back too.”

  “Do you seriously think you sold my Uncle’s blood to people who will let your girlfriend live? I didn’t think you were that big of a fool.”

  Jiggly burst into horrid, ragged sobs. “Pray for her, please! She prayed for me all the time, to the Blessed Virgin, and God help me, I laughed at her and slapped her around for doing it. What was that boring book you kept reading out loud to us when we were sailing around the Horn? Tale of Two Cities? The one where that grave robber thumped on his wife because she kept floppin’? I keep hearing those words in my head ‘If she was anywise inclined to flop …’ Please, please pray for my Maria, and help her, even if she is Catholic. She loves some God or the other that’s more like yours than mine, which I think is Asmodeus.”

  “Talia, you cannot just go and confront that cafe owner,” pleaded Aunt Sophie. “You are running on adrenaline, but think how long you were on the planes getting here. Think how long since you have even eaten. The rush will wear off, and you will feel it when it does.”

  “Well, I’d better hurry before it does wear off,” Talia replied, grabbing Jiggly by the collar before he could squirm away. “Come on. Let’s get your girlfriend and those artifacts.”

  “Take some of the diggers with you, Talia,” Aunt Sophie begged, tears running rivulets in the lines worn into her cheeks. “Maybe they can protect you from this monster. How could you betray us, Guglielmo? How could you? If you hurt our precious Talia – ”

  Talia forced him out of the tent, unable to listen to her aunt’s sobs. She called out and the diggers appeared. With some difficulty, she executed a pantomime and some pidgin that produced glares and mutters directed at Jiggly. Three men climbed into the back seat of the Rover, all of them armed with knives. Talia felt very safe, but a little worried that Jiggly might not make it as far as the cafe to point it out to her.

  “I never even told my girlfriend I cared anything about her!” Jiggly wailed, beating his fists against the dashboard as Talia took off for the town where the hospital had been located. “I never, ever told her. Just yelled at her and banged on her and laughed at her faith. I laughed all of yours too. I would never die for a belief. But look at all of you. God will curse me for putting Maria in danger, and for the betrayal of righteous people, won’t he?”

  “Jiggly,” Talia sighed, very reluctant to speak the words, “as far as I know, the only thing that will curse you is rejecting Jesus until you die. No matter what you’ve done, God forgives. Yeah, he forgives pigs who beat their girlfriends and betray people who put bread in their mouths and – well, whatever else you’ve done that I don’t want to know about. I wish He would hang you by your toenails over the bottomless pit and singe you bald, but I guess that’s why it’s a good thing He’s God and I’m not.”

  “God cannot forgive me,” Jiggly blubbered, half in Italian, half in English. “Maria’s blood is on my hands. Naddy’s blood is on my hands if he dies. If I get you killed too, it will be like I killed an angel. That’s how they talk about you. You’re their warrior angel. You’re gonna fight those people who wanna make the Word go away, and kick the – out of them.”

  “Stop it, Jiggly, and tell me where the cafe is. Here’s the town.” Talia had to force her hands to relax and flex her fingers. She hadn’t realized how tightly she had been gripping the wheel to keep from punching Jiggly.

  “There it is. The Greek’s Ransom,” Jiggly almost fell out of the Rover when he swung his arm out and pointed.

  Talia stared at the sign. What a weird combination of Greek words. Why would a Greek have a ransom? Who’s he ransoming? Or is he getting ransomed?

  She got out of the Rover, feeling a sudden tremor in her legs. Oh, no! God, I need Your strength. She forced her legs to cross the street but they simply stopped holding her up. The three diggers got her and Jiggly into chairs at one of the bistro tables. Jiggly put his head on the table and kept on wailing and blubbering. Talia couldn’t move – couldn’t speak. One of the diggers walked up and knocked on the cafe door.

  A tall man dressed in ultramarine blue stepped out and took in the sight of the three dirty diggers, penitent Jiggly and paralyzed Talia and quickly brought a hand up to his mouth. Talia realized he was trying to stop himself from laughing.

  “Come over here!” Talia ordered, though it sounded more like Cahhm aahhvrrr hrrr. The man approached, positively shaking with mirth. She forced herself upright, both hands clamped to the edge of the table. This time she didn’t expect as much of her tongue and her words came out clearer. “Who are you, and why did you steal my uncle’s artifacts?”

  “I have not stolen anything. I have taken them into safekeeping. Your uncle was foolish to trust this creature who beats his woman and leaves her alone to be kidnapped and mutilated. A man who does not value his woman should be rolled in dung and left for the dogs to worry.”

  “Wow, we have a lot in common,” Talia’s grin felt like something a stroke victim might execute, and she felt secure enough to sink back down into her chair.

  “More than you know.” The man thrust out a fist and she saw a ring that bore the same symbols as the lock on the bag. The same symbol as the ring that Doctor Ewing had worn.

  “Wha – wha – ?”

  “Have your men help you inside, and bring that whining thing as well. I will make some tea, and we will talk.”

  Chapter Fourteen – “Not Not Not a Liar”

  “Hey, Keith, I’m sorry, but I have some bad news.�
� Clark Johnson doffed his hat as Keith opened the front door. “Is your dad home?”

  “What do you mean, Clark? Is it my grandmother?”

  “No, no, I’m sure she’s fine. I promised I’d let Principal Bradley know personally about the emergency, but I guess you can relay the message.”

  “Emergency? What emergency? Clark, what are you talking about?”

  “She was stopped by the side of the road, and I could see how upset she was. Understandable, considering they’re her only family.”

  “What? Are you talking about Talia?” Keith grabbed Clark by the collar. Then he remembered Clark carried a gun and quickly pulled back.

  “I’ll excuse that, and not charge you with assaulting an officer of the law,” Clark said with a stupid grin.

  “Clark, please, somehow, can I get you to start from the beginning and explain what this is all about?”

  Clark explained. Keith heard him out, slammed the door in his face and immediately called Talia. He got voicemail. For the rest of the week, he had kept calling. Sometimes he got voicemail, and sometimes some message that the number was unable to receive calls. He figured that must have to do with the satellite reception problem Talia had mentioned.

  Keith tried to inject a little science and fun into the Bible as Literature class on Friday.

  “Blow this up,” he ordered Tyler, a boy in the front row, handing him a balloon. “You, and you, blow these up.” All three students blew up their balloons. “Tie ’em off, and give ’em here.”

  Keith moved to the desk, which he had cleared and covered with an asbestos cloth. He pulled open a drawer and set the three blown-up balloons inside, carefully pushing aside the one filled with water that he had already placed in there. The fire extinguisher sat right by the desk, so nobody would report that Mr. Safety was being unsafe. He set a candle in a holder in the middle of the desk and lit it.

  “Can somebody tell me what perfection is?”